Stoke City technical director Mark Cartwright says their alliance with St Pauli is no vanity project.

Cartwright insists there's concrete plans to have the partnership benefit Stoke's first team.

He explained: "I don't think we're there yet but we see a lot of players who we could quite easily go and spend £1m or £2m on – but if we're spending that money they'd have to go into our first team squad.

"Whereas if we have a conduit to be able to buy them then put them in a place like this then hopefully by the time we get them back they are valued at £5m, £6m, £7m, £8m and they are then going directly into Mark Hughes's squad.

"Our objective is to find players for £2m before they are eventually worth £15m, develop them and then put them in our team. If that helps gets players through to our first team then it's working."

Cartwright continued: "We have a global scouting network and St Pauli have theirs which is probably slightly smaller because we're at different levels. But it's quite obvious that we quite like Germany as a market in respect that it's very similar in terms of the leagues.

"The more knowledge we can get for due diligence on players, background information and character references, the better. There are little things to find out which are harder than is he a good player and can he kick a ball? That's where it will really help us.

"For St Pauli obviously they are shopping in a different market place.

"For the Ryan Sweeneys of this world, for players like Dom Telford, Ollie Shenton, Tom Edwards who are trying to get into our first team – and we firmly believe they have a good chance of doing that – then to play somewhere like this in front of 30,000 fans that have got the same enthusiasm for their team that our fans have got, it makes perfect sense."